Hacker News Reader

Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

Lots of gatekeeping and snark in these comments. Every time something hard gets easier, the pure who suffered hardest come out of the woodwork to inform you that the easy thing you're doing is not as good as the hard thing they've been doing since you were in short pants.

Composition is great for prototyping and small-scale production. As you level up and learn about optimizing BOMs and DFM, you will start to swap out MCU boards for your own designs; you'll see how that $10 I2C rotary encoder can be replaced with $1 worth of resistors, capacitors, a Schottky diode and a hex inverter.

Anyhow, I came to say that with companies like JLBPCB and PCBWay offering 3D printing and CNC services, you don't even need to buy a 3D printer to get started.

Heck, with https://wokwi.com/ you might not even need prototyping components.

View on HN

Totally agree with your comment on the gatekeeping and snarkiness. Also my current foray into hardware (as a software guy) tells me there's tons of low hanging fruit on the design rules side to cover all sorts of scenarios for "production ready" component selection, placement, and environment concerns.

My gut tells me that the software market that serves hardware engineers isn't nearly as creative or ambitious as that on pure software and even devops or infrastructure.

Huge opportunity there.

I'm in a similar boat so maybe totally naive, but this seems true. I think the software industry is super rich in tooling because software engineers understand software, and can build their own software (haha..). Non-software fields have crap software because usually their only way to get some is to hire a software person who doesn't actually understand the industry. Introducing a communication barrier like this massively dampens productivity. Things are much smoother when the person using the software can actually dig in and fix the kinks themself instead of filing a Jira ticket.

Big companies buy solvers and support contracts, not interfaces. That's why everything has a crappy buggy interface slapped on it.

You are not wrong overall, but I am not sure if the opportunity is huge, at least IMO not enough to sustain a VC-backed company (or perhaps barely). As a benchmark, Altium has a market cap of 6B. The fundamental problem is that there aren't that many HW engineers out there (compared to SWEs and SWE adjacents like DevOps etc). And the existing players are super entrenched into existing companies doing HW design.

There are some interesting companies out there that I am watching, like flux.io. The problem there is that none of these companies are working on creating open-source tooling, so their endgame seems to be getting acquired by Altium, Cadence et al.

I fear a future where doing even regular PCB designs will be gatekept by the Cadences and Synopysyes of the world, akin to how IC design is today. At least we have KiCad right now, which is getting really powerful and is fantastic for doing PCB development work.

The problem is that 1) "design rules" are in practice more like guidelines, and often need to be violated in order to actually get stuff made, and 2) all the data is wrong, contradictory, and cannot be trusted.

A lot of the work of a hardware engineer is reading and interpreting datasheets and trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. The low-hanging fruit which can easily be automated is the easy part of the job, and writing the input data for the automation ends up taking more time than just manually doing it yourself.

I have dabbled into writing some software extensions for KiCad, and some turned out to be very useful and now save me quite a lot of time. However, every time I tried to be "clever" and solve a seemingly easy problem, it ended up not being worth it in the end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com